The Hippopotamus Effect

The Sunday Telegraph, May 8, 1994

STEPHEN FRY is crouching uneasily over the bookshop banisters, holding a copy of his new novel. He peers over it with the pained but patient look of a university don told to put on a party hat for the camera, as the local paper's reporter asks him, "How pleased he is to be in York, that kind of thing." The photographer pulls out a large stuffed hippo and gets Fry to embrace it warmly. An elderly couple watch him in stoic bemusement. "Well," the husband says, "that's one way to earn a living, I suppose." This is part of his living, part of the "all-round entertainment package" of Stephen Fry. He is here to touch what he calls the "ears of the hippopotamus"; to whisper politely in the ears of the bookshop buyers and the fame-struck groupies who represent the visible tips of the subterranean bulk of readers behind.

You could say, though, that the hippo is more than that; it is a good analogy for the shambling monster of effort and hype required to sell any novel these days. What you see might look lightweight, but there is a whole industry underneath, and it is coming to get you. Part of it is on display on the two-day tour around the country to promote Fry's third book, an inebriated gallop through miracles, belief and what the manager of Waterstone's in Manchester calls "all you ever wanted to know about shagging a horse."

This means a frantic timetable of appointments to meet the people, placate the booksellers, and ensure that every possible opportunity is seized to make the punters pay. The full schedule runs to almost a month before the last book is signed, the last interview squeezed in between appointments, and the last drop of media coverage extracted. By the beginning of the tour and two weeks after publication, Fry has already signed around 4,000 copies of The Hippopotamus, explained his views on celibacy, politics and equine intercourse to the national press, and seen his face, a large red bath and a squelchy mammal peep out from posters all over London. The process began as soon as the new book was delivered to the publishers, Hutchinson, in November.

Back at Christmas, someone, somewhere, was busy with the jacket, the proofs, the point-of-sale material, the individual bookshop orders, the press releases, the invitations, the early magazine interviews, the nationals, the locals, the radio stations, the television spots, the launch party, and the endlessly redrafted publicity schedule. And by the time Fry reaches Heathrow on a Wednesday morning in mid-April, the essentials of the country-wide tour have been condensed into two days, five cities, nine bookshops, six interviews and more requests for a personal birthday message than one man can decently take.

Fry's publicist, Alex Hippisley-Cox, is at the airport as well, to push him forward and pull him back, invisible, charming and relentless. She is also here as sheepdog, nanny, psychiatrist, walking wallet, travel agent and spirit-lifter to protect the publisher's most lucrative asset. In some ways, she is what you would expect: a well-bred blonde, cheerful, cautious and dedicated. Having been in publicity for years, she is used now to the endless hangovers and the cancelled evenings at home in favour of a deserted signing session somewhere in the forgotten regions of London. Her contact with the different authors on Hutchinson's list varies, as with most PRs. It can range from the distant business relationship of Margaret Thatcher's media handbagging to the possibly apocryphal story of one publicist called from the next-door hotel bedroom to attend to her author who was having problems inserting her suppository.

For the major authors, it means indulging their whims for shiatsu masseurs or intravenous whisky to the limits of patience, sense and budget. For the less well-known, it is the more emotionally taxing one of finding cheery things to say about the non-existent signing queue or the brute indifference of the literary editors. The less-visible aspects of her job include ensuring that she and the publishing company are on good terms with most of the bookshops in the country, lying about bad books and enthusing about good, and negotiating the quicksand of the media. Authors, and by extension their publicists, have long memories for old slights or grudging reviews, and most journalists will be screened carefully before being permitted access to the big names. Certain hacks are blacklisted, others are risky but may be bought with a little judicious lubrication in the right places, most just have to be watched with care. They are absolutely necessary to sales, but exasperatingly haphazard in their judgments.

For The Hippopotamus, the problem has not been generating publicity, but filtering access - selecting as diplomatically as possible which events and media will ultimately generate the best publicity and therefore the best sales. So far, the coverage has largely been favourable, although the reviews so far are slightly lukewarm and there is a prevailing tone of irritation that the man persists in being quite so annoyingly gifted all the time. While each publishing company varies in its approach to publicity, there is always the need to launch a book with maximum impact.

There are 80,000 new titles published every year - 80,000 new products which have to find space on the bookshelves, in the reader's minds and in the editor's copy. Since the publishing mergers of the 1980s, the big companies have relied increasingly on transatlantic-style blockbuster promotion. Fry's campaign will be Hutchinson's largest of the year, but between Random House's 20-odd imprints there will be more than 40 author tours, all of which will require in miniaturised form something of the clout of this one. With The Hippopotamus they have a guaranteed cert on their hands - the initial print run was 60,000, it has already reprinted once, and has shot with inexorable speed to the top of the bestseller list. Most of the big authors - Jilly Cooper, Joanna Trollope, Frederick Forsyth, even Margaret Atwood - are PR pros by now.

Some relish the chance to get out of the garret and meet the silent masses of readers, others just see it as an inevitable part of the modern publishing process. As Fry points out: "Once you're finished with the book, you think that's it; but the publicity takes longer than the writing. The hard work actually begins with the last full stop." He complains good-naturedly about the publisher's "doe-eyed weepiness" if he were to refuse, and then rallies, reminding himself that "it's rather like sex - you dread it in anticipation, but it's not that bad after all". By the time we hit Leeds at lunchtime, Heathrow has been charmed, we are 40 copies down, and Fry has completed The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian crosswords.

The manager of the local Waterstone's stands over a daunting pile of books as Fry checks spellings and exchanges inanities with the buyers. "Is that Carole with an E? Yes? Lovely. How nice. Marvellous . . . you are kind." Most either become tongue-tied, vibrating with nerves at meeting fame in the flesh, or suddenly feel a compulsive need to reveal their life history. One multiple-purchaser, surrounded by three admiring girls, is delighted. "I've been a fan of his for years - I love that Fish & Fry, or whatever it's called. He's a great man - the modern-day Jonathan Miller, if you ask me."

After York, there is the train to Manchester and the biggest event of the day. Tickets at Waterstone's in Deansgate had sold out weeks previously and by 7pm the place is packed and restless with the desire to be entertained. Downstairs, the manager, already pink with suppressed bonhomie, confronts Fry with a tableful of 250 tottering volumes to sign. "My God," says Fry, paling slightly, "the rarity value of an unsigned copy . . . " By now he is developing inky callouses on his writing fingers, and his signature looks more like Simon Fag. After 20 minutes, fuelled by drink and effusive flattery, Fry has signed them all and is introduced to the audience as "unique among celebrities for being well-liked". Fry, lit up by some indefinable performer's energy, explains something of the philosophy which underpins the book, and reads a passage complete with full vocal effects for each character.

The audience is a mixture; students, housewives and hard- ened bookbuyers; several businessmen and a lost-looking gentleman who stares stony-faced through every joke, and stalks from the shop having bought copies of Toni Morrison and Thomas Keneally. Fry steers one of the subsequent questions round to allow for a further brief but thoroughly explicit reading on the essential divide between the sexes; men are desperate for it, women are desperate to pretend they are desperate for it. A couple of the men grin and shuffle. The women respond with delight. At 9.45pm, almost three hours after he started, the last copy has been signed, the last sales pinged through the till, and the last journalist given Fry's view on male bonding.

Alex looks delighted, as do the manager and the staff. Fry looks as though he needs a stiff drink. There is no need tonight for Alex's pep talk - the bookshop, the publishers and the punters have been satisfied, 1,000 copies have Fry's signature on them and there is good local newsprint to follow. Fry's encroaching exhaustion only shows itself physically, his eyelids drooping like ruched suburban blinds. Alex, however, announces cheerily as we slope off to bed that the morning flight to Edinburgh means a 7am start.

"Arses," says Fry with profound feeling, the only display of impatience of the day, and retires to nurse his callouses. Until we reach the first bookshop on Princes Street the next morning, all of us have been monosyllabic with fatigue. But there, amid another tottering pile of Fry's collected works, he begins again, charming the big, the small and the hardened purveyors of books to Edinburgh's adoring public. This is just an "informal bookshop visit", to make contact with the booksellers, and to make the beleaguered local rep feel involved in more than just remote balance sheets.

A slightly fixed look comes into Fry's eye every time another cardboard cut-out of him, the bath and the hippo appears. As we bolt from one shop to another, he lunges for a small unsigned stack and scribbles compulsively, unable now to leave a single copy uninked. In Jenners, the department store, the doughtily corseted ladies pout like pigeons, and tell him he will do quite nicely for their clientele whose normal order is a wholesale monthly purchase of a dozen Mills & Boons. Fry pauses wistfully for a second by the whisky counter but cannot linger, because The Scotsman's photographers want a picture of him boarding the train to Dundee.

On the platform, he leaps up and down, up and down, a picture of speed frozen in a catchy slo-mo picture, not minding the idiocy of it, nor that his passage down the train leaves a wake of whispering, swivelling heads. Alex waits in the smoking carriage, used to dealing with an author happy to be moulded like child's Plasticine into whatever gimmick - baths, flippers, corsets or stuffed hippos - that the media's imagination can dream up. There is no time in the schedule to do the interview anywhere else, so the paper's reporter is on the train, looking worried. She takes Fry on a quick trawl through sex, politics, television, train travel, celibacy, Scottish golf courses and his unfortunate problems with cleverness.

Each question is given the same Gladstonian length, the same apparent fascinated interest and enthusiasm. When the train stops, we gallop onwards, through the Mexican wave of rubber-necking passers-by to James Thin's bookshop. Here, for the first time, things go slightly wrong. The shop is ominously empty - almost no queue, and the signing desk embarrassingly close to the door. Fry signs the reserved copies slowly, spinning it out for as long as possible and the few punters stare indifferently. Perhaps, the staff think, it is the expense of the hardback that is the problem. "If he was Billy Connolly now, it'd be better - he's not as big up here, his humour's too English," the manager says, groping for an excuse. "Terry Pratchett, he got 880 people - they were queueing round the corner, and it was the same with the guy from Rangers."

Alex circles in the background, waiting for the right moment to announce that there is an urgent train to catch. Fry scribbles on a copy of a Ben Elton book for one of the students. "I wouldn't have minded if it had been Hannah Hauxwell," grumbles Alex later. "At least she's one of our authors." As Fry staves off the attentions of a token lunatic who wishes to discuss baked bean commercials, and as the sparse queue dwindles entirely, we bolt, heading for lunch in the local pub, and a brief salvage operation. "That was a bit embarrassing, really," admits Alex. Back in Edinburgh, BBC Radio Scotland wants a full-length recorded interview for its Kaleidoscope-type programme, The Usual Suspects. The interviewer, Siobhan Synnot, admits she had been "a bit terrified - all that stuff about a brain the size of Kent, but he was charming". Listening in the green room, I think how strange it has been to hear a whole series of cross-examinations over the past two days with so few antagonistic questions.

Fry is so universally liked, so open in his confessions and such a wonderful talker that there seems neither anything to expose nor anything to attack. For most journalists, Fry's legendary good manners, courtesy and honesty is mightily inconvenient. But isn't he infuriated by endlessly having to repeat the same answers? "There is usually only one answer to a particular question anyway. If someone asks you, 'What is two plus two?' you can't say, 'Oh, I don't want to say four again, because I've said it before.' It's the right answer and you have to say it again. You curse yourself for giving an answer that you did before, but there is no way out of it." After the interview and a brief stop at the hotel, he is required to perform at a bookshop event at one of the University lecture halls.

There, he paces backstage, preoccupied and suddenly distant, as the manager makes her introduction. "The bookshop staff will be frisking you on the way out to make sure you've got your copies," she says briskly and gives Fry the stage. The audience here is older, more earnest; their questions self-consciously erudite - one about the "misdirectedness" of the novel's hero, Ted Wallace, and another on T. S. Eliot's influence on it. Fry reads the passage on Ted's sexual opinions again, and an elderly couple near the door twitch with disapproval, the wife holding her face in her hands in pained disgust. They leave, bookless.

After the signing and the courteous dismissal of a terrified student from the university paper, it is over. The reps and the bookshop staff clear up the unsold signed copies, and we slump into a taxi. Fry is clearly flagging, exhausted by the effort of being on permanent display, unable at any time to be off duty, despite the zest with which he had asked, for the umpteenth time, the precise spelling of names from the giggling, celebrity-struck buyers.

Over supper, I wonder aloud what has been the most-asked question of the tour. By a narrow margin, probably the next TV series of Fry and Laurie, closely followed by a stream of requests about whether he will appear again in other favourites, such as Jeeves and Wooster. "No questions about a new novel," says Alex, ominously. Hasn't he hated all the gimmickry, the repetition, the inanity of it? "No," he says emphatically. "Absolutely not.

This is all part of the unspoken contract that exists between someone who performs and writes and someone who watches and reads. It isn't just about sales at all. It's to make people like booksellers feel part of the process, and - though it may sound very pious - it's meeting people who might read the book because there's an element in me of the performer; I would be very frustrated if I wrote it and then never met anyone who was the audience." The regional tour is over, bar the journey back to London the next morning. Over the past two days, he has signed 2,000 books, been variously compared to Jonathan Miller, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and a dodgy celebrity cashing in on his name, has signed autographs for everyone from the taxi driver to the hotel staff, and has made his publishers very, very happy.

But as we hit London, Alex is gearing up for Fry's appearance on Clive James's show that night, and Fry is off to a full day's rehearsals with Hugh Laurie at the BBC. He has another 10 days of promoting the book in London, and in the autumn there will be another publicity tour for the film or the TV series, and then a miniature one for the publication of the paperback next year. And you thought celebrity was fun. Bella Bathurst was a runner-up in The Sunday Telegraph Catherine Pakenham Award for young women writers.

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